making minor changes and saving the file (this also bypasses the "discard certificate" warning, if the file was also signed (as is my case).

Prerequisites: none, other than putting your word files in a folder the script (which the script will prompt you for, and for an (optional) substring, to filter file names) .

Limitations:

I used to have also have, per module in the VBA project, warnings: “Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Unexpected error (40230) ” and try to bypass these also, but since I cannot replicate the warnings, this remains untested.

A superior approach (enabling round tripping) would be to attempt to automate entering the password, but the traditional SendKeys approach is unreliable, and newer approaches (using SendMessage from the the Win32 API or bypassing the intended negative effects of password protection, via an in-memory substitution).